For industrial products, e.g., semiconductor devices, selection of materials is one of the decision-making events that will largely influence the performance of the products. As such, especially in order to win the race of technology development, it is an ongoing demand to be the first to spot a promising new material and work toward its practical use. Properties of substances are reported in academic journals and conference papers, so if they can be monitored continuously and comprehensively, it is possible to quickly search out a substance that can be a candidate for the new material with properties suitable for a desired industrial product. However, unless experts having advanced knowledge dedicate an enormous amount of their time to such a search, extracting the necessary information from the vast amount of papers is difficult.
For example, related to consumable goods such as home electric appliances and automobiles, systems have been in practical use which are intended to ascertain quality problems early on by extracting reviews of each product from a stack of consumer comments posted on the Web and analyzing the extracted reviews as time series data. Also, systems have been proposed which calculate the degree of association among genes, compounds, and diseases from documentary information and estimate the significance of genes and compounds to diseases based on the calculated degree. These systems have a commonality in extracting the necessary information from extensive text-based information to support decision-making.
However, taking into account the following, it is not easy to utilize these systems to find a substance that can be a candidate for a new material with properties suitable for a desired industrial product from extensive text-based information. For example, properties to be considered vary depending on the use of a material, so as to which property should be extracted is not apparent information. Also, even if a property to be considered is known, it is not apparent what kind of information about that property, when extracted, would allow for a judgment that the substance is sufficiently matured for practical use as the material.